The presently disclosed subject matter relates to a server, a method, and a system for managing a tenant.
In recent years, more and more companies use a cloud service in order to quickly handle cutbacks in cost of owning IT resources and business environments experiencing drastic changes. One of key features of the cloud service is “to provide a service on demand.”
In general, the cloud service is provided by using IT resources of a data center (DC). More specifically, a service is provided by using a tenant formed on the data center. Here, the tenant represents a virtual infrastructure for each client. In particular, the tenant is targeted at a network part.
In order to realize such a feature of the cloud service as described above, it is necessary to frequently change a composition of an IT system. In the same manner, for a network being a part of the IT system, the network needs to be designed and configured to frequently change the composition. Here, design and configuration of the network represent designing a composition of the network (generating a configuration detail of the network) and setting specific parameters or the like for the designed composition of the network.
There is a feature that the composition of the tenant within the cloud service can be classified into several patterns, and hence there is a pattern-based provisioning as one approach for easily designing and configuring the network. The pattern-based provisioning is a method for automatically generating the tenant by previously defining information necessary for the design and configuration of the tenant as a pattern and selecting the pattern in a case where a user designs the tenant. This allows even the user who does not have expertise knowledge about the network to easily design and configure the tenant.
However, tenant patterns corresponding to a large number of tenant compositions are necessary in a case of newly introducing the DC, providing the cloud service having a new tenant composition on the existing DC, or other such case. To that end, it is necessary to generate the tenant patterns corresponding to the respective tenant compositions, which increases a work load involved in the generation of the tenant patterns.
This is because validation is complicated to check whether or not each tenant pattern is capable of generating a proper configuration detail (command) for a device. In particular, in the design and configuration of the network, there are a large number of items to be validated, and hence work for validation thereof imposes a heavy load.
In order to solve the above-mentioned problems, there is known a system for easily generating the configuration details of software and a network while performing validation. Examples of such system include Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2008-171318 (hereinafter referred to as “Reference 1”) and Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2001-94559 (hereinafter referred to as “Reference 2”).
Reference 1 discloses a technology capable of registering a composite part obtained by combining existing software parts in a database for reuse and validating consistency of the composite part together with a dynamic behavior thereof.
Further, Reference 2 discloses a technology for realizing an increase in efficiency of work by associating design work and construction work for a network with each other and automatically creating system data determined at a network design stage. In addition, paragraphs (0024) and (0047) of Reference 2 discloses processing for validating the consistency of data within a node database in accordance with a predetermined validation rule with respect to the node database being the configuration details of the communication network.